The BBC is refusing to back down in a row with the London School of Economics (LSE) over an undercover film about North Korea made by a journalist posing as one of the prestigious university's students.

The LSE has demanded that the British broadcaster pull the program, scheduled to go out on Monday night, after calling the subterfuge "reckless and irresponsible".

It said the students on the trip would have been in "serious danger" had North Korean authorities discovered the truth about reporter John Sweeney, who apparently claimed on his visa application that he was a doctoral student in history.

However, the BBC insisted in a statement that "the public interest in broadcasting this program is very strong indeed" as an insight into one of the world's most secretive states.

Director of programming Ceri Thomas insisted that students on the trip were informed beforehand that a journalist would be travelling with them and knew the risks.

The trip was organised and attended by Sweeney's Japanese wife Tomiko, a recent LSE graduate.

"We think the risks as we explained them to the students were justified," Thomas told BBC radio, adding that they were briefed individually and as a group before they set off for North Korea.

"But I need to be absolutely clear that if we had any suggestion that lives were at risk or anything approaching that - either the BBC team's lives or the lives of the students - then we wouldn't have gone anywhere near this."

He added that the North Korea Undercover program for the investigative Panorama show had been authorised at the highest level at the BBC, saying: "This went right to the top".

LSE director Craig Calhoun warned that the investigation had left the university's students and staff, and academics generally, "in a very difficult, if not dangerous, position".

"The subterfuge was employed, ironically, because the North Korean government considers BBC and other independent journalists akin to British spies," he wrote on the Times Higher Education website.

"The danger now is that the North Koreans, and governments in equally sensitive parts of the world, will think the same of LSE staff and students.

"The entire enterprise was reckless and irresponsible from start to finish, as well as deeply dishonest."

Mr Calhoun said the trip to North Korea appeared to have been planned entirely to facilitate the insertion of a three-person BBC team into the secretive communist state.

He said it was not planned or officially sanctioned by the LSE, although it was advertised by a student society.

The BBC said it never intended to make reference to the LSE in the program, and the faces of three students who have since complained will be pixelated.

But Mr Calhoun said details of the trip were always going to leak out.

"The school, and its students, were both kept in the dark and cynically enlisted as cover for an immensely risky exercise by an organisation that should really know better," he wrote.